Wayfaring Stranger
by cluelessclown
Summary: Henryk's struggles as a poet lost in the midst of the Warsaw ghetto. One-shot.


His hands ached. His chest burnt. And yet, he wrote. He was relentless at it; little could anyone do to stop him. He was the scriptor of the ghetto's cruelty; the painter of its solitude and darkness in spite of its growth in population with every day that went by. He shuddered at the thought of how children inside the ghetto wouldn't even flinch at the sight of a dead person on the pavement. If it had been him, aged ten and carrying an innocent soul upon his chest, he reckoned the least he would have done would have been letting out a loud gasp, a choked sob even. So would have done his brother, Wladek, or his sisters. And yet children those days didn't really seem to be children anymore — striped from their youth, their innocence and the naivety that is usually brought by a young age, their souls were little more than wayfaring flickers of life that were constantly threatened with being blown away by the SS officials that haunted the ghetto like wolves.

That was, in a way, why he started writing about the ghetto. He had always had a thing for literature, really — he had been condemned by the necessity of writing all that sped through his mind since an early age. Of course, little had the short stories he wrote inside the ghetto to do with the childish things he had written in the past. He had always praised Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Goethe and Joyce — now he would constantly mock them and think that little did those nineteenth-century bourgeois-y authors know about the hardships of life. He had attentively read and celebrated Kafka's writings, along with a number of Jewish authors he hadn't been taught about in university. He despised positive, simple literature, written in what he believed a gaiety that could only be found in authors that determinedly had endured little hardships throughout their lives. He was glad to see that the ghetto, if not in its entirety, was somehow depicted in other authors' struggles — this, somehow, made him feel safer and somewhat at ease.

And so he wrote. He would write everything that occurred to him while sitting on his old, ragged mattress next to Wladek's — he didn't have much spare time, having to feed his family and take care of his aging parents, but he usually wrote when everyone else slept and he could steal a flicker of light pouring from the little window in the small living room he slept in. He would reminisce what he had seen throughout the day and simply write it down. His style was sober yet intricate; unbiased yet passionate. He poured his feelings and thoughts into every single word. And, though he usually disliked most of what he wrote, he always felt better after dropping his aged pen. Because writing was what helped him get by, and because those hours sitting by the gloom of the night were perhaps one of the few reasons that kept him sane inside the colossal warehouse of madmen and hunger that was the Warsaw ghetto.

One day, however, he was unable to keep on writing. He and his family were moved out of their temporary home in the ghetto, and were sent to work somewhere else. Little did Henryk know that was the beginning of what would be the Szpilman family's end — for five of the six of them, at least. He became quieter, angrier, moodier. He knew it wasn't his brother's fault, but there were days when he wouldn't even bother talking to him. Wladek knew that Henryk's sole ambitions were to write and to fight the nazis — and yet they were all trapped in some factory that was to be closed soon anyway. He tried to write, but he hardly could — his pen was running dry, and so was his seared soul. One could think that a man on his twenties, with most of his life ahead of him, should not feel so rotten and cold; but the truth was that Henryk Szpilman could feel Death's cold breath on the nape of his neck at all times.

He, after all, couldn't help but feel like he had been defeated by the nazis. He, the young, sarcastic man who had once snickered at the thought of subordinating himself to the nazis' power. He, the wild poet who had once claimed that he would be both Rimbaud and Lord Byron — what he hadn't imagined was that, in fact, he would die around the same age as they did.

In the Umschlagplatz, he wrote a few last words before they were called to board the train that would take them to what the nazis and the Judenrat would call _the East_. He wrote it on the front page of his sample of _The Merchant of Venice_ — he had hated writing on his books in the past, but the war had made him change his mind about quite a number of things — and, though simple and short, he couldn't help but smile sadly as he imagined those words would be the last he wrote.

"Yes, Shylock. They've prickled us, they've tickled us, they've poisoned us. Revenge will be an option. But not today. I am too tired, too little resilient. I feel like an old soul trapped inside a young man's chest. I've known little in my life — I haven't read all the books I intended to read, I haven't visited all the places I had dreamt about as a young man . . . I never fell in love, either. But it is I, Shylock, the young yet old Henryk Szpilman, who is now parting on a quest that has been the center of discussion for all religions throughout history. Do I deserve to die? Does my father? Does my old, lovely mother? Do my sisters, or my brother? Does _anyone_ in this Umschlagplatz deserve the fate the Nazis have condemned us to? They've wronged us, Shylock. And as for me, I am still expecting revenge. Not for me, but for my people and the struggle they have been put through."

Upon finding an old sample of _The Merchant of Venice_ in an old, crippled bag while cleaning up Gas Chamber 1's entrance in Treblinka, it was said that a young Polish soldier fell to his knees, weeping quietly upon the fate of a wild poet that had been tamed by hunger and despair.


End file.
